Fighting for Jesus: The Church Militant, American Style

Those of you who follow this site on a regular basis probably realise that ABC’s piece on the North Dakota Bible camp is right up our alley as a topic. So we’ll get right to it.

The first question we need to ask is why American evangelicals use military imagery when they rarely–and we mean rarely–advocate actual violence or revolution. The answer to this question is simple: the military is a popular institution with Christians, thus using military imagery resonates with Christian people. This is especially true with men’s ministries, but we see it pretty frequently with youth ministries as well.

Liberals automatically translate this into evangelicals wanting to overthrow the existing system by force. In this respect, the liberals are thinking further down the road; most evangelicals have not thought out the issue that far, and really don’t want to because they are too respectability conscious. (They read the Bible, too.) We have thought this issue out, and know of people who took it that far.

Short of that, liberals also translate this training into political action. They are on safer ground here. Their idea that evangelical training for young people is “bad for society” is based on the fact that people so trained won’t vote–either with their ballots or their lives–the way liberals would like them to. This is pushing the liberals’ panic button harder than anything else. We can’t see how a true, pluralistic, representative democracy will survive this kind of “management of opinion.”